


We Go Together

by GryfoTheGreat



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Coming of Age, Friendship, Gen, Gender Roles, General Sad Teen Stuff, Vignette, mild pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 00:19:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9522431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GryfoTheGreat/pseuds/GryfoTheGreat
Summary: ...like girls and boys and murder stories and sleepy, tiny towns.A series of Riverdale vignettes.





	1. Multiply

**Author's Note:**

> [Here on Tumblr.](http://gryfothewriter.tumblr.com/tagged/we-go-together) Requests welcome!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'I'm not trying to be Ed Sheeran!'

“Is it any good?” Archie asks nervously. “Is it awful? It’s awful.”

“No, it’s…” Betty lapses into silence, listens to his voice frame words, notices a botched chord transition – years of violin will do that to you. “It’s good. I mean, you’re no Ed yet - ”

He yanks out her earbuds with a huff, and Betty screws her nose up at him. “I’m not trying to be Ed!” The squeak in his voice is amplified by the bleachers.

“You’re a ginger guy doing acoustic love ballads. Of course you’re trying to be Ed.” Veronica plops down beside Archie, and he stiffens like a frightened cat. Betty tries not to take pleasure in it. “May I?” She doesn’t wait for a response, and slips the earbuds in.

Archie gapes at her with a ‘ _mayday, mayday!_ ’ look on his face. Betty grins at him and says, “I think you could polish up the lyrics a tiny bit. Maybe vary the subject content. Love songs wear a little after a while, but I like it. If you were busking, I’d give you a couple bucks.”

“Is that praise?” Veronica asks.

“Yes,” Archie says decisively. “Betty runs from public donations.”

“Mom says they’re all scams,” Betty responds, in a tiny voice. “And once when I was seven a Salvation Army bell-ringer hit me in the face halfway through Jingle Bells.”

Veronica bursts out laughing, and Archie says, “Oh man, I forgot about that. Dad had to pick you up and run away with you before you cried.”

The song ends, and Veronica, the remnants of the laugh slipping from her face, hands Archie his earphones. “Nice,” she says, and though Betty isn’t even receiving the praise she feels it wash over her like a warm bath. “If I have to go back to Manhattan I’ll hand out your mixtape.”

“Deal.” Archie holds out his hand to shake hers, which Veronica does in a very business-like manner. Betty isn’t paying attention; instead she watches Jughead Jones slink across the parking lot, somehow taller and thinner than ever before, and she didn’t think that was possible. She hopes he’s doing alright, now that he and Archie aren’t talking. Betty was only ever Jughead’s friend via Archie, but it always drove her mother mental, and, though she would like to, she’s too afraid to approach him alone. He’d reject her, anyways. He always did love The Catcher in the Rye too much.

“Betty?”

“Yes?” She snaps back to the present, and hopes that her vacancy wasn’t too obvious. She’s trying her hardest to skimp on the Adderall, but she really doesn’t know if it’s working or not.

“Bell rang.” Veronica is already standing, adjusting the straps of her backpack as Archie extends a hand to her. “C’mon, they’re doing the cross product today.”

Betty rises under her own power and doesn’t feel guilty when Archie flinches. “Let’s go, then.”

Veronica leads the way, chattering about how much nicer calculus is than algebra, and Betty flicks her eyes over her shoulder to see Jughead vanish. When she looks back Archie is staring too, mouth pressed into a thin line. He doesn’t meet her eyes.

Betty catches up with Veronica, who slips her arm into hers, and adds one more worry to the pile.


	2. Drawn Curtains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty wonders when they stopped being best friends and started being neighbours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinda Betty/Archie, mostly platonic.

There's a difference, Betty thinks tiredly, watching Archie walk away, shoulders drawn tightly together underneath his suit jacket, between growing up _together_ and _growing up_ together.

She doesn't remember the day they met, because they were too young to remember. Her mom went over to visit the Andrews when Mary came home from the hospital three weeks after she did and placed them in the crib together, two jaundiced newborns who still grabbed onto your finger if you held it out to them. They were supposed to have the same due date, but Betty, anxious as always, arrived three weeks early, and Archie, who took his sweet time as per usual, was a week overdue.

The pictures are better memories than her own. She traces her fingers over their glassy surfaces as she walks back up the stairs to her room, high heels abandoned at the front door. The two of them starting kindergarten, Betty squinting in the sunlight, Archie still red-eyed from crying because he wasn’t allowed to bring Spotty to school. In the nativity play in second grade, Betty's tinsel halo askew, Archie yanking on the end of his tea towel shepherd headdress. Running a lemonade stand one summer under Polly's watchful eye, sugar smeared on their grinning mouths. At their last middle school dance, Betty just a hair taller than Archie, fiddling with his red bow tie.

She pauses at that photo, looking at her inexpertly applied mascara, at Archie’s cowlicks. That’s when the disconnect started. Mom started urging her to 'think about her future' because Polly was shaping up to be a writer, of all things, and Mom had given up on her. Archie's mom left and he wouldn't cry in front of her even though he wanted to because his uncles told him that boys didn’t cry.

But if boys didn’t cry, were girls supposed to cry for them? Betty couldn’t figure it out. She never quite got comfortable with the girl thing. It was difficult reconciling her tree-climbing, bug-eating childhood with sanitary towels and the sudden expectation that she flat-iron her hair. She felt like a fraud, like the girl in the mirror wearing a pleated skirt and a floral blouse was a stranger, like the lipstick she bought in the local drugstore was a betrayal of who she really was. Before, it was okay for her to be a tomboy - Mom didn't mind if she came back with mud on her jeans and concrete dust in her hair, and she let her play football and softball and read the Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew and watch Ben 10 after Totally Spies.

Then she got her first bra, and she was a woman now, and 'sweetie, you’ll be a freshman before you know it, don't you want to get a head start?'

So she got her head start. She quit her sports and she started wearing Mary Janes instead of Converse and she watched Archie chase Jughead around the yard with a slug he found under an old pile of bricks while she was supposed to be revising Spanish, wondering when Jughead took her place by his side.

Back then, if they had to be separated, they would talk constantly; pass notes in class, drag the landline into their room, even, at a push, do light signals from their windows. They kept ciphers behind the radiators under their windows, chaining childish swear words together using a freebie mirror compact she snapped in half, and laughing when a parent barged into the other's room, connected by the complicity of a shared lie.

Now they text because emojis are easier than memorising codes, and Betty doesn't reply for hours because I can't, _I'm sorry, I have to study, Mom wants me to go shopping with her, I have to go to the doctor with Polly_ -

_\- Are you okay?_

She looks out the window into his room, curtains still open. She used to spend hours in there, scratching Spotty's ears while Archie read comic books. She hasn't been in there in six months. He's glancing between his phone and his unwieldy guitar, still not used to the big one his dad got him for his fourteenth birthday. She unconsciously imitates the furrow of his eyebrows; when she checks her reflection in the mirror she glimpses him looking at her window, fingers tense on the frets, red pick jutting from his clenched fist.

_\- I'm okay. I'm going to bed. See you Monday :)_

She gets up and draws the curtains without meeting his eyes. She lies down, still fully clothed, and feels disgustingly empty.

By the time he catches up to her - by the time all the other girls and more than a few of the boys start looking and whispering, Betty feels only resignation. He was going to grow up too, just like she did. He's not Peter Pan, and she's not Wendy.

But for a second - just the space between one breath and the next, the gap between his parted lips, she thinks that maybe he was there alongside her, that they _grew up together_ , that he struggled like she did, that he’s as much of an adult as she is - as she is, because Betty is reliable and per -

Then he says that she's too perfect for him, and he's nothing but a little boy again, jumping into a puddle off the front deck only to break his nose and run crying to Betty for help.

God help her, she loves him anyway.


End file.
